A Perth physicist and Mars One astronaut candidate hopes to generate the first breathable air on the Red Planet with a project that has made the finals of an international competition.

Josh Richards, along with a team of students, hopes to send a system, which will convert water into breathable oxygen, to Mars as part of their Helena Payload project.

Theirs is the only southern hemisphere entry to reach the finals of the Mars One university competition to land experiments on Mars.

The project also plans to provide a time capsule of artwork from social media users around the world for the planet's first colonisers.

We'll use the electricity from the solar panels to split the water into oxygen and hydrogen and we'll essentially prove that you can produce oxygen on Mars that future settlers will be able to use.

Josh Richards

Mars One is a not-for-profit foundation that aims to establish permanent human life on Mars.

"What we're looking to do is we're going to tap into the water that Mars One lander is going to produce when it goes [to Mars] in 2018," Mr Richards said.

"Then we'll use the electricity from the solar panels to split the water into oxygen and hydrogen and we'll essentially prove that you can produce oxygen on Mars that future settlers will be able to use."

University of Western Australia engineering student and project co-lead Andre Van Vulpen said the Helena Payload would be the first example of life-support technology on the surface of Mars.

"Our experiment will hopefully pave the way to ensure the survival of the elected astronauts on the Red Planet as we attempt to produce oxygen from Martian resources," he said.

Mr Richards said a payload was a scientific term used to describe the module that would carry the system required for the experiment.

He said the Helena Payload's simplicity sets it apart from the other competition entries.

"Ours is a vital technology that we'll need to put humans on Mars and it's also something that we can prove quite simply," he said.

"It's certainly practical and it's something that people from all over the world can actually get engaged with by contributing their artwork as well."

The time capsule of artwork is an idea inspired by the Golden Record, which was mounted on each of the Voyager 1 and 2 interstellar probes.

"Essentially what we want to do is send a time capsule of humanity to Mars in 2018," Mr Richards said.

"The idea is people can contribute artwork through various different social media and those images and videos and tweets will essentially be stored on a data storage device that will go with the payload and will be recovered when the first human colonists actually get to Mars."